My slightly out-dated vocabulary has a tenancy to get me some dirty, or at least weird, looks. See, I was raised on the Victorian writings of Lewis Carroll; namely Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Jaberwocky, and The Walrus and the Carpenter.

And, if you read Carroll works nowadays, something may strike you as a bit odd.

He used the word queer quite often, for it was just a common word in the Victorian Era (trust me on this, I had to do a Satanic essay last year on Vic Lit). But it brings a few giggles now to immature little boys as they read old works of Carroll and to see almost everything odd referred to as queer, because gosh darnit, “queer” is just a more educated word than “weird” or “totes batsh(yay)”

…

And yet, that’s how I talk.

So people give me the queerest of looks when I’ll say (in context of course, but still rather out of the blue)

  • “you’re acting a bit queer at the moment”
  • “It’s just been the queerest day”
  • “the queerest thing just happened in the locker room”
  • “what a queer sound!”
  • “this place is a bit too queer for me”

comments like these. Priceless. Some things just sound better in your head. And then there’s the awkward moment when you’re talking to a gay/lesbian/not straight/i-don’t-even-know-what’s-politically-correct-anymore and the word queer, used to mean odd, slips out.

Open mouth, insert foot.

It’s the sort of thing you regret the second you say it.

But really people, stop using slang. I have issues with slang that’s too widely known. It just ruins words for me.

Here are the first three definitions of “queer”, according to the .com of dictionaries

1. strange or odd from a conventional viewpoint; unusually different

2. of a questionable nature of character; suspicious; shady

3. not feeling physically right or well

So there you have it. The actual definitions of queer. Please learn to use words correctly, because slang is queer (see definition 2).

…

Well, this has been sufficiently awkward…

~phan

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